Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos (clockwise from left): Courtesy of Dobrinka Salzman and the artist; Kris Tamburello/Courtesy of FENDI; Courtesy of Wexler Gallery; James Harris/Courtesy of Sarah Myerscough Gallery
Eighteen New York galleries headed south to this year’s Design Miami where there were notably less dogs in attendance and many more Cybertrucks. This year, curator Glenn Adamson gave participants the theme of “blue sky,” which seemed to call for risk-taking and optimism, and some saw it — “It feels alive,” one art installer noted. If anything, the pieces asked viewers to look twice, with an emphasis on meticulous craft, mixing new technologies with the handmade, and a lot of chunky, woven wall works. There were a few unexpected sights, like the one of attendees playing Ping-Pong on James De Wulf’s concrete flower-petal table. One thing everyone seemed to agree on: This year, it was eclectic all around.
From left: Photo: Tom Wright/Courtesy of Gallery FUMI and the artistPhoto: Tom Wright/Courtesy of Gallery FUMI and the artist
From top: Photo: Tom Wright/Courtesy of Gallery FUMI and the artistPhoto: Tom Wright/Courtesy of Gallery FUMI and the artist
In Land Before Time at Gallery Fumi’s booth, Charlotte Kingsnorth’s stumpy three-legged desk and chair look like they could have wandered over from the Everglades. Kingsnorth hand-painted the leather upholstery in earthy shades of green and brown, and the effect of the patchwork construction and uneven, bulbous surface look like stitched skin. Kingsnorth likes that ambiguity — some viewers see scales, others veins or tree bark. The London-based designer admits that she “likes to mess with” how humans process things through association. You can see it in the tree stump tables, spider lamps, a faux-fur spider stool with toilet-plunger legs, and a herd of fluffy, refurbished Thonet chairs. It’s a look that’s led to custom commissions for clients like Tyler, the Creator and A$AP Rocky.
From left: Photo: Dobrinka Salzman and the artist/2023Photo: Dobrinka Salzman and the artist/2019
From top: Photo: Dobrinka Salzman and the artist/2023Photo: Dobrinka Salzman and the artist/2019
Photo: Dobrinka Salzman and the artist/2023
Three decades of trying to find the right light as a cinematographer and photographer paved the way for Christopher Baker’s The Field Lighting lamps. In his Series 1 collection, one overhead light hovers delicately like a metal mobile, swaddled in six panels of Uda Gami paper and four panels of hand-loomed pineapple silk; small leaf-like shapes and circular motifs cut from jewelers sheet brass are threaded on the lamp’s structural metal rods like ornaments on a tree. Though his Field Lighting makes clear reference to Noguchi, Baker veers into other lanes as well: surrealism and modernism, notably, the wire works of Alexander Calder and Fausto Melotti’s installations of brass and textiles. In other pieces, multicolored silk strands that Baker dyes by hand in his Maine studio are knotted around a stainless circle into a tassel curtain shade planted in a sturdy wood base.
Photo: Courtesy of Wexler Gallery
Photo: Courtesy of Wexler Gallery
Originally from St. Louis, Nick Missel considers his work a kind of “archaeology of the working class.” Take, for instance, his eight-foot-long Double Knot table, which borrows its texture from the egg crate. But he gives the packaging a glossy upgrade using fiberglass, resin and automotive paint, its dense and shiny edges falling in on themselves like folded cake batter. His other pieces explore other industrial materials: Letters After Midnight console is composed of jagged, stacked aluminum car radiators that look as if they have been pulverized by a bat, and his silicone and memory-foam Infrathin cubes are also simultaneously unsettling and inviting: warped cube-shaped stools in high-contrast tones — neon green and royal blue, purple-pink and black, that squish when touched.
Photo: Kris Tamburello/Courtesy of FENDI
Photo: Kris Tamburello/Courtesy of FENDI
Photo: Kris Tamburello/Courtesy of FENDI
Lewis Kemmenoe brings his jigsawed puzzle-piece technique to Fendi in a collaborative collection titled ænigma or enigma. The designer, based out of London and originally from Kent, is the latest in a long line of the fashion houses’s collaborators for the fair since 2008. (Tom Dixon, Sabine Marcelis, and Maarten de Ceulaer are among the alumni.) Kemmenoe’s research took him to museums in Rome and Fendi’s Tuscan factory, fresh off his fine-art studies at Central Saint Martins. The booth’s cream walls and carpet stood in contrast to the capsule’s geological textures of rocks and metal lodged in timber and leather. There was even a patchwork leather handbag, Kemmenoe’s take on Fendi’s signature Peekaboo. From the back, the space-age armchair chair is a collage of monotonal woods in a gold trimmed frame, from the front the built-in brass is the deep seat’s inner shell, occupants of the plush chair are encased like a ’70s-era conversation pit for one. Another piece that highlighted his patchwork technique in a less rigid form was a rich mahogany cabinet inlaid with large alabaster rocks sporadically spread across the doors.
From left: Photo: Stéphane Aboudaram/Courtesy of the galleryPhoto: Stéphane Aboudaram/Courtesy of the gallery
From top: Photo: Stéphane Aboudaram/Courtesy of the galleryPhoto: Stéphane Aboudaram/Courtesy of the gallery
LAMB gallery’s compact booth was covered in geometric Art Deco prints and highly symmetrical, patterned surfaces, standing out next to its neighbors. One zigzag-bordered mirror faced another, two red harlequin-patterned sconces hung between them, all of them woven from Iraca Palm and all by Magnetic Midnight Maison. Founded by Lucía Echavarría, the brand functions like a craft collective in Echavarría’s native Colombia, through which the designer works with local makers who specialize in techniques distinct to the region and passed down over generations. Informed by her three years of study on Colombian craft style and techniques, Echavarría considers the collection a “personal anthology” of her country’s cultural heritage and artisanal practices. Beyond chairs and tables, she also presents something less expected: game boards for chess and backgammon, in which beads in pastel pink, green, lilac, and subdued red form mesmerizing checked surfaces. The work was made specifically for the show, in a palette that is an ode to Miami’s colorways. Through her work, Echavarría is able to preserve Indigenous material techniques and processes, as in her handwoven Chimichagua bench, a fiber that Chimila people indigenous to the Andes of northeastern Colombia once used to weave sleeping mats and now covers a wooden chaise inspired by the fireside chairs of 19th-century France.
Photo: James Harris/Courtesy of Sarah Myerscough Gallery
British gallery Sarah Myerscough’s “dreamscape” booth installed a bedroom that looked like the furniture had grown (or dripped) into place. The pieces, by Prague artist Tadeas Podracky, who has a fine-art background, were all in different shades of ivory, and their textured surfaces were the standout. While we may be used to gloopy forms in design, Podracky’s white-waxed wood Morana chair, complimented by Eleanor Lakelin’s smooth sculpted eight-foot vase, still feels distinct from its counterparts. The conceptual goal, Podracky wrote on his Instagram, was to stretch our understanding of “living” through the object’s materiality. The three works on display were from the artist’s Bloom of Bones collection.
